Bike and Bible Verse

Mike got a new (to him) bike!  It's a used Rodriguez that someone brought into R&E, which is a wonderful bike shop here in Seattle, owned by our friends Dan and Marcie.  Dan noticed that the guy selling the bike had the exact same build as Mike, and he had a feeling it would be a great fit.  He was right.  Not one thing on it had to be adjusted.

Now we can ride together again!  I've missed that.  In fact, all of us have bikes now, except Drew, so we can be one of those hippie biking families.

Yesterday I got a form in the mail that I need to fill out for Zach's graduation.  They want to know his name as it will appear on his diploma, his head size for the cap, etc.  We have the option to have him actually participate in the school's ceremony, but it's in Ohio, so that's not happening.  Zach doesn't want to anyway.  What's kind of interesting, though, is that there's an entire page of information for homeschoolers who do want to participate, dealing with the dress code of the academy.  The very first thing covered is haircuts for male students:

Hair is to be cut in such a way that it does not come over the ears or collar.  Hair is to be proportional and evenly layered or tapered.  Sideburns should be no longer than the middle of the ears, and no beard or mustache is permitted on a student.  Hair and clothing styles related to the counter-culture are not acceptable.

I Corinthians 11:14  "Doth not nature itself teach you, that, if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him?"

Huh.  I guess Drew, when his time comes, won't be welcome, unless he gets a haircut before then.  

Exciting Thing #2

I talked about something in the last post that I ended up deleting, but only because I screwed up that section.  (One True Media videos can sometimes make a mess of things, especially if you've already published, and then you go back and try to edit.  They can wreak havoc on the font of anything nearby.)  Anyway, I'll tell you about it here instead.

The second exciting thing that happened today (and by "exciting" I mean for me, not necessarily for you) is that I joined Nutrisystem!  I'd been thinking about it for ages, trying to decide if I wanted to pull the trigger.  I weighed the pros and cons (so to speak), talked to Mike, researched online, and finally I made up my mind to go for it.  That was probably close to a couple weeks ago, and since then I've been extremely amped.  I even dreamed about it...ahem...more than once.  (In one of my dreams I was Dr. Who's companion, and I shlepped the Nutrisystem food onto the Tardis with me.  Why, yes, I am the biggest geek you know!)  Considering my hatred of counting points/calories, I think this is going to work for me.  My big box of food will be here in 4-10 days, and when that happens I'll show you guys what I got and kind of explain how the program works.  (Yeah, this is one of those things that I'm probably going to talk your ear off about.  Deal with it.)

A Really Exciting Thing

Mike and Drew picked up Drew's new guitar today!  Drew is just beside himself with happiness.  I think I've heard him say some version of, "This is the most amazing guitar I've ever played!" at least 5 times in the last hour.  He also said, "I feel like somebody just sat down and made a guitar exactly for me."

This is the beginning of "Cliffs of Dover" played on the new guitar.  He's made big strides with that song in the last couple days.  (We did it in a couple takes, which is why there's a hitch in it near the end.  When we did it the first time, Drew realized he forgot a section, so he played it again and I spliced them together.)

The Tub Incident

This story was related to me by Drew and Baylee separately.  They were each laughing as they told it...

Tonight Baylee was standing at the bathroom sink, brushing her teeth, when Drew walked in.  He wanted to brush his teeth, too.  Since there wasn't a whole lot of room by that sink, Drew chose to sit on the edge of the bathtub.  Everything was going along fine, when suddenly and without warning the the entire shower curtain and rod fell down on his head.  The rod actually hit him in the nose, which both startled him and kind of hurt, and made him fall backwards into the tub.  So there he was, toppled over, and completely tangled in and covered by the curtain.

Baylee had her iPod in her sweatshirt pocket, so she did what any little sister would do.  That is, she whipped it out and started filming.  She didn't get much.  All she managed to capture was his climb back out, but I kinda love it anyway.  It's a short, fun brother-sister moment.

  

Introverts and Genetics

12th Grade at Our House

Doing one of these posts does take a little bit of forethought, since it involves taking pictures throughout the day.  That's why this last "grade" post is so late.  I'd get halfway through a school day and remember that the post still needed to be written, but then realize that I'd gotten no pictures.  The other hold up was that Zach was/is a super unwilling subject when it comes to being photographed.   I had to promise to buy him an Arizona green tea just to get the ones I have here, and, as you'll see, they're not great.  They're mostly sneak-attack pictures.  lol  Oh well.  Hopefully you'll get the gist.

Zach has fewer classes then ever before in high school, because he doesn't need many more credits to graduate. Weirdly, though, he seems to be as busy as ever.  I'm not sure why that is, unless it's just that most of the subjects are pretty difficult.

Anyway, to get to the point, Zach always starts his day with economics.  This is a one-semester course that he started fairly recently, and he doesn't like it.  It's very tedious.  It's all about supply and demand and price theory and stuff like that.  Blah.  Maybe it'll get more exciting as time goes on.  (Yeah, right.)  Last semester he had civics, and that wasn't exactly a barrel of laughs, either, but I think he appreciated learning all about our government.

Here he is this morning doing economics.   Drew was on the other couch doing world history.

When he was done with that he made himself coffee and took a 15-minute break, then he and I sat down together at the dining room table and I quizzed him on things from his latest chapter in British Lit.  It didn't take much, because he went over it quite a bit on his own yesterday, so it wasn't long before he was ready to take the test.  He ended up getting a 98%!  It included questions about authors and literature from the Augustan Age, and it had a whole section on fixing dangling or misplaced modifier mistakes.  Finally, there was this little vocab section...

 
At around 11 or so Mike took Zach out for some driving practice.  He's getting pretty darn good!  Yesterday they went out onto the highway for the first time.

After lunch both boys sat down for an Old Testament survey lesson.  Today we talked about the land allotments given to the tribes of Israel, and how each tribe was supposed to wipe out all the idol worshippers in their area.  They failed, and in fact started intermarrying and getting into idol worship themselves, and that led to problems for Israel that lasted the rest of the Old Testament.  My friend Craig MacDonald wrote this curriculum, and in this lesson he tied in the idea that "bad company corrupts good character" and that we're not to be "unequally yoked" with unbelievers.  I've actually talked to all my kids about that before...especially the unequally yoked part...but it was really good to discuss it again.  I could see the wheels in Zach's mind turning.  He's the kind of guy who can learn from other people's mistakes.

Here are the boys answering the questions at the end.  Zach always zips through them, and Drew always asks for his help.  lol  I've talked about this before, but in the last couple years it's been so interesting to me to see the different ways these two learn and their different strengths.  Zach is much better at this Bible course than Drew is.  He's just a deeper, more philosophical thinker.  On the other hand, Drew can run circles around Zach in geometry.

 
Finally, Zach did geometry.  He really hates this part of the day, and he especially hates going through the flashcards I made.  As much as he doesn't like them, though, they're necessary.  There's so much memorizing in geometry.  You have to hold a lot of definitions and ideas in your head at the same time in order to do the proofs.

And last but not least, Zach has Tang Soo Do class two nights a week.

And that's 12th grade at our house!

Midnight Music 2

Several months ago I was watching a documentary around midnight, I heard music, it turned out to be Drew, and I wrote about it here on the blog.  Last night the same sort of thing happened, and it was right around midnight again.  (I know he often stays up late practicing.  He usually does it with headphones, though, so we don't hear him and tell him to go to bed.)  He was teaching himself "Cliffs of Dover."  Actually, he had been messing around with that song all day long, and I totally enjoyed it.  It's a really great piece of music.

Here's the real thing.

And here's me being a creeper and secretly listening outside Drew's door.  I knew if went in there he'd stop playing and get in bed (where he should've been).  Anyway, his playing here isn't at all perfect, but it's not bad for one day of practicing by ear!

Quick

Baylee went to a birthday party on Saturday.  Well, first she and Rachel had their penultimate basketball game.  Rachel made 14 points!  She's turning out to be quite the talented player.  Then Baylee went to this party, which started out at the movie theater.  Since it was all preteen/early teen girls, lots of pictures were taken.  These are a couple of my favorites.

Then yesterday Baylee did the special music (Is it me or does anyone else think it's weird that it's called "special music?"  It's been called that since...forever.  I remember it being called that when I was a kid.) during the evening service at church.  A couple months ago the plan was that she, Drew, Nick, and Grace would all do it together, but then Grace backed out, which had a domino effect.  Have you ever played that game at summer camp where someone is asked to lead the group in prayer before a meal, and everyone puts their thumb up?  The last person to get their thumb in the air has gets to pray.  This was like that.  Baylee didn't get her thumb in the air, so to speak.  Anyway, she did a good job last night at church.

Today is our first day back to school after a wonderful midwinter break.  We're in catch-up mode again because of that break, but it was worth it.

Charles

The other day Baylee, Drew, and I were in the car, and for some reason we were talking about the name Charles.  Baylee said she doesn't really like it all that much.

"Baylee," Drew said, "there were all kinds of famous men in history named Charles."

"Like who?" she asked.

"Well, there was Charles...Spurgeon!  He was a great man."

That was the end of the conversation, but secretly I was laughing.  Have you seen Drew lately?  He's this lanky, shaggy 15-year-old punk (I say that with love), but the first Charles that came to his mind was Charles Spurgeon.  LOL  What a homeschooler.

Wordless Wednesday  Throwback Thursday  Flashback Friday  Sentimental Saturday!

 

Thoughts about Music

Drew's been in two shows so far at the SoR, and now he's in his third.  Those first two shows were led by the same man, Zeke, and so the style of the direction was the same.  Drew was allowed and maybe even encouraged to do a lot improvising.  To be honest, a little part of me always wished Zeke would've forced Drew to play the solos exactly the way they're written.  In my opinion, if you're going to do a cover, you should just do the cover and not change it too much.  It's probably a personality thing.  I like giving people what they expect.  Plus, when it comes to music, I've never had the confidence to just go for it.*

Now Drew has a new director, Lori, and I guess she falls into the same camp I do:  She told the kids that they're not to put their own spin on things.  I'm secretly excited to hear Drew play something exactly the way it's supposed to be played, but he's struggling with it a little bit.  Yesterday he was telling me about it, and he said, "I'm never going to play Jimmy Page like Jimmy Page.  I can only play Jimmy Page like Drew."

"Okay, " I replied, "but you also have to make your director happy.  That's your job."

He assured me that he's sticking closely to the original (and maybe sneaking just a bit of his own touch in) and so far everyone seems happy with what he's bringing to the table.

All that said, I have to admit one really admirable thing about Drew is that he's never been scared to throw himself into the music, make mistakes, sound bad, and learn.  I love that.

*I remember one time during a piano lesson my teacher told me to play "Fur Elise" again, but with more emotion.  Not knowing where to go with that, I said, "Can you show me what you mean?"  He sat down and played it beautifully, with all kinds of feeling.  Then I sat down and copied exactly what he had just done.  When I finished he practically fell over himself telling me what a great job I did and how it was just what he wanted.  lol  Doh.

Little Things

Let's see.  I just have some little things for today.

• Zach got hurt in his advanced Tang Soo Do class last night.  They were sparring and he was kicked in the ankle.  He said he acted like nothing happened at the time, and then afterward made a supreme effort to walk away without limping.  lol  Poor guy.  Today he's limping all over the place.
• I wish Zach was more open to being videoed.  He's just not, though.  He showed me the coolest spinning, jumping kick the other day.
• A couple nights ago around midnight Drew came out of his room and said that his electric guitar broke.  My heart sank.  We're getting him a new one, but he won't have it for awhile, and in the meantime he depends on this one for everything he's doing at the SoR.  He impressed me, though, because he calmly opened up the guitar and figured out that it was a wire that was loose, and then last night he and Mike were able to fix it.  Now it's perfectly fine again.
• If you're wondering about my bike riding, I'm still doing fine.  I had to stop for about a week, first because of having a bad cold, then because of the weather.  It snowed, then we had several days with high wind.  After that last time, when I stupidly went out in what felt like a hurricane and couldn't go faster than 7mph against the wind, I vowed I would never do that again.  It's worse than rain and cold put together.
• I'm really excited about something...Christmas-level excited.  It's been on my mind for a couple weeks now, and I still have a little more than a week to wait until it happens.  I'm counting down the days!  I'll talk about it sometime in March, I think.

Kid Confessions

Man, we've been enjoying this break!  It's so nice to get up later and mess around more...incidentally, several new Dr. Who episodes were added to Hulu Plus this week!  Bonus!!!...although I am getting some deep cleaning done.  I've also made some nice meals for the family.

Speaking of food, today Baylee and Rachel made a cake, and it turned out to be delicious.  (That's not a given with these two.  #meatloafdisaster)  Aren't they cute?

The other day a very penitent Baylee came up to me and confessed something she did two years ago.  She told me that back in 5th grade, when her video teachers got boring, she would sometimes fast forward them.  She was actually nervous that two years later she would still get in trouble for it, but to tell you the truth it was all I could do not to smile.  I managed to put a serious look on my face and say something like, "Okay, thank you for letting me know.  I really appreciate your honesty, and I forgive you."  She walked away from the conversation very relieved.  lol

It's weird how kids do that, isn't it?  I remember Drew doing the same sort of thing once.  My heart goes out to them when it's happening, because I know they had to muster up courage, but it's hard to seem appropriately...I don't know...grave, I guess.  All I really want to do is smile and give them a big hug.  Sigh.  Kids.

PS:  Don't get me wrong.  It's fine now, but if I had known she was fast forwarding through the "boring parts" of that expensive curriculum back at the time it was happening, I would've gotten my freak on.

"Nailed It"

Here are some pictures of things people tried to copy and totally nailed.  Only not really.  At all.

 

And the worst...

Embarrassing Stories

Since I talked about college yesterday, today I'll tell you three more college stories, all of which involve me being an idiot.

Story #1:  One time I was running down the hall on the way to class, and I saw my friend and dorm RD, Lisa, standing in the middle of the flow of traffic, talking to one of the professors.  (cough...Craig MacDonald...cough)  As I rushed past I turned and made some sort of funny, smart-alecky comment to Lisa, when suddenly my feet got tangled in themselves and I fell flat on my face.  It wasn't just a regular fall, either.  It was one of those fly-through-the-air type of deals.  My schoolbooks went everywhere, too.  The worst part was that both Lisa and Mr. MacDonald stopped their conversation, stared at me for a second, then went right back to talking like nothing happened.  It's hilarious now, but at the time I was SO MORTIFIED.  I couldn't even think about it without feeling embarrassed for years.

Story #2:  One time our college was having an event of some sort, which included a meal for a lot of people.  Besides the regular dining area, they had the rec room set up with tables.  Anyway, I was working in the kitchen, and the head cook told me to take a tray of jello squares out to the rec room.  No problem, right?  Except that someone had just sprayed oil on the handles of the foosball table in there, and some of it got on the floor.  As I walked through it my feet went right out from under me like a cartoon, and boom!  I was on my back.  I mean, it was horrifying, I know, but I am proud of one thing:  Through that whole fall I kept the tray horizontal and saved the jello from disaster.  I even announced it as a laid there:  "The jello is fine, everybody!  I saved the jello!"

Story #3:  The college had a custodian who, every spring when it was still muddy, cordoned off a little area of the lawn right in front of school.  He did that to give the grass a chance to grow well and not get trampled and destroyed by students taking a shortcut through there.  One day the entire student body was coming down from chapel and Mike and I were walking together.  (We weren't married at this point; we were just dating.)  We came up to that little area of the lawn, and I dared Mike to jump over the cordon.  It was a rope that was tied around some trees about three or four feet off the ground, and it looked doable...probably.  Sure enough, Mike took a little bit of a running start and hopped over it easily.  Then he called, "Okay, your turn!  I dare you now!"  Well.  I couldn't just not do it, could I?  So I got a running start, too, but exactly as I was attempting the jump I slid on the mud (the same mud that the custodian wanted us to stay out of in the first place) and fell.  In fact, because of the running start I actually slid on my back for several feet, going right under the cordon.  When I stood up I had a brown streak up my back from head to foot.  Even my hair was caked with mud and standing up like a cow licked it.  Being very embarrassed, I did what anyone would do:  I smacked Mike in the arm and said, "This is all your fault!"  LOL  He still likes to make fun of me about that to this day. 

Our Dog and Stuff

Fact:  Our dog will happily eat entire bars of soap, but he won't eat brussels sprouts.

We're taking some time off of school for "winter break."  Yes, it's a bit ridiculous, but all the public schools around here do it, so...well...peer pressure!  Actually, I don't care what the public schools do.  It's just a nice excuse to take a welcomed few days off.  I shouldn't admit this, but I spent almost all of this first day of the break curled up on the couch in my pajamas watching a several-episode documentary on ballet.  Why?  I'm not exactly sure.  I do love a good documentary.

Yesterday I read something that got me thinking about my experience at Bible college.  I loved that college, and in the four years I went there I had so many great professors and wonderful classes, but I also had a handful of duds.  I'm sure that's true of all universities and colleges.  Every class can't be wonderful, right?  Anyway, I was remembering back to the worst of my bad classes.  It was called "Religions of the World."    It sounds interesting, but it really, really wasn't.  Everything I got out of that course I could've learned by reading the $20 softcover book we had to buy for it, also called Religions of the World.  That's because the instructor did absolutely nothing but paraphrase the book, page by page.  He never strayed from it to tell us anything different, interesting, personal, or new.  He was a nice man, don't get me wrong, and he meant well, but his class was so boring and ridiculous that it got to the point where literally nobody in there paid any attention to a word he said.  We just realized that anything we needed to know for the exams we could get by simply studying the chapters, and so one by one everybody started quietly doing their own thing.  The guy who sat on my right, Scott, ended up spending the entire semester playing a muted Gameboy that he had hidden under the desk.  The guy on my left, Jim, used the time to read Moby Dick. 

One day I must've forgotten to bring whatever I normally did to keep busy, because I found myself paying attention to what our professor was saying.  He happened to be lecturing on Confucianism; specifically, he was talking about Confucius' book of sayings, The Analects.  The only thing is, about halfway through the class period he accidentally stopped calling it The Analects and started calling it The Analsects.  The first time he said it I did a double take in my mind.  I looked around, waiting to see what people's reaction was going to be, but...nothing.  NOBODY, not one person in the class, reacted in any way, because nobody was listening.  Even our teacher himself didn't realize what he'd said.  Then he said it several other times.  In fact, he just kept talking on and on, obliviously calling this religion's holy book The Analsects for the entire rest of the lecture.

At one point I nudged Jim on my left.  "Jim!" I whispered, "Are you hearing this?!"

He look up from Moby Dick.  "Hearing what?"

"Mr. [so and so]!" 

"What about him?"

"He's been saying Analsects for, like, the last twenty minutes!"

"Anal what now?"

I sighed.  "Forget it."

I somehow managed to suffer through the rest of that class period, the rest of the semester, and the rest of my life with the knowledge that the weirdest thing had happened, and there wasn't one single person besides me who was even aware of it.

"Newlywed" Game

Tonight I hosted a "Not-So-Newlywed Game" as part of a sweetheart dinner that my peer group put on for the peer group that's my parents' age.  It was a church thing, so, of course, it was nothing like the actual game show on TV.  There wasn't a single mention of "whoopie," for instance.  (Thank goodness!  I'm seriously prude-ish and could never countenance that.)  Anyway, it was fun.

One time, a few years ago, Mike and I were at an event, and we were picked to be contestants in a marriage game like this.  We ended up winning the thing.  The deciding question was, "How many windows are in your house?"  I answered it completely wrong, but Mike's number matched mine, because he knew I would get it wrong, and he knew why, so he purposely wrote an incorrect number down.  He even explained his reasoning to the audience when he did it...which was before I came in.  LOL  It was both hilarious and annoying at the same time.

Valentine's Day, 2014

Happy Valentine's Day!  Mike got me flowers and chocolate.  He's a nice guy.  I really love him...and I like him!

I'm sitting here, so incredibly tired right now.  If I sound more weird than normal, that's why.  This has been a long, strange, interesting day.  To start at the beginning:  Last night Baylee came to me with a request.  She saw online that a "celebrity" (and by celebrity I mean a YouTube sensation with 5 million followers, most of whom are preteen and teen girls) was going to be doing a "meet and greet" type thing here in Seattle, and she wanted to go.  Baylee happens to love this girl, whose name is Bethany Mota, by the way.  At first I told her no, but then she said, "Please, Mom?  Wasn't there a famous person you wanted to meet when you were a kid???"  In that moment I thought of my 10-year-old self's undying love of Bo Duke, and, of course, then I had to take her.  lol

We got to the Bellevue Square Mall more than two hours early, which a little part of me figured was a bit silly.  I mean, how many people were really going to want to stand in line to meet this person, right?  Wow, was I wrong.  The line when we arrived was already so long that it snaked through the mall, out the door, and into the parking garage.  There were thousands of people there!  I heard one of the security guards say that people started showing up and camping out at 6:30AM!

Here we are out in the parking garage...

  
I thought we were a long way back, but hundreds and hundreds of people came after us and were even farther back in line.  Luckily, it was all very organized.  Everything moved like (very slow) clockwork.

While were were still in the parking garage, a random dad and his kids came up to me and said that he and his daughters were too far back in line, and they didn't think they'd get the chance to meet Bethany.  (He was probably right.  There was a 2-hour window.)  He asked if I'd give these to her if we got to the front.  I said we would, and we did.

Here we are almost to the door of the mall.  At this point we'd been waiting more than an hour.  We stood in this breezeway another hour, and it was COLD.

Finally we got inside!  From here it was maybe another 45 minutes or so.

All in all it took us 3 hours to make it to the front of the line.  Then Baylee met Bethany and 10 seconds later we were out the other side.  LOL  They hustled people through the actual meeting her part like cattle in a cattle chute.  (Wait...do cattle get hustled?  It seems like they might.)  Long story short, the whole experience was one of the crazier things I've ever been a part of.

Baylee absolutely loved it, though, so it was worth it.

Once we got back home Baylee wolved down a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, quickly packed an overnight bag, and was out the door again to a rollerskating party/sleepover at a friend's house.  Zach, Drew, and I cleaned the house, and then their friend Kian came over to spend the night here.  And now I'm wiped out.  Time for bed.

Old Pics

I'm pretty sure I've shown most or all of these here before, but I'm gonna do it again.  It's not our anniversary or anything.  It's just that some of my friends on FB have been showing old wedding pics lately, and it's been fun to look through them all.  Can you believe Mike and I have been married for 20 (actually 20 and almost 3/4) years?  The time has gone by really quickly in some ways!

School Stuff

Man, the boys have been working so hard over here in our homeschool in order to catch up.  Both of them are doing great and are slowly but surely getting to where they need to be in every subject, and that's awesome, but it's a big effort for them and me both.  I just keep reminding myself how wonderful it will be when it's May 31 and we're completely finished.

PS:  I case I'm making it sound like we've been huge slackers, it's very easy to get behind when you're using an extension-school program like we are for high school.  The student is expected to get every single page of every schoolbook, not to mention every test and paper and project, 100% done.  There's no skipping anything.  There's not even a cushion for sick days.  Add in dyslexia and you have yourself a real challenge.

Different subject, but still school-related:  One of the things I enjoy about Baylee's history program is that the main textbook, The Landmark History of the American People, often includes things I don't realize are important to our country's history or growth.  For instance, today Baylee learned about how much of an impact mail-order companies like Sears and Montgomery Ward had on society in the late 1800s to early 1900s.  It was neat to read about.  I'll tell you something, though:  People back then could be just as inappropriate in what they chose to "post" as they are now.

Then...

Once in awhile people would write to the Sears or Ward catalog, asking for things that had nothing to do with what the companies actually offered.  For example, they would want help dealing with a disobedient child or assistance in finding a bride.  This is a real letter written to Montgomery Ward:

Please send me a good wife.  She must be a good housekeeper and able to do all household duty.  She must be 5 feet 6 inches in height.  Weight 150 lbs.  Black hair and brown eyes, either fair or dark.  I am 45 years old, six feet, and am considered a good looking man.  I have black hair and blue eyes.  I own quite a lot of stock and land.  I am tired of living a bachelor life and wish to lead a better life and more favorable.  Please write and let me know what you can do for me.  ~Landmark History of the American People, vol. 2, pg. 57-58

Isn't that funny?  And he was really picky about exactly what he wanted in a woman, too!

Now...

People post stuff like this on Facebook:

I mean, I love Jesus, too, but come on.  An elf???  In a waterfall???

So, you see?  It's not a new thing.  Some of us here in America have always been a little bit dumb.  It's comforting in a way! 

One of Baylee's Memories

Today Baylee and I were reading 2 Chronicles 22 as part of her Bible lesson, and we got to the part where the child Joash was hidden away, so that he wasn't discovered and killed by the evil queen.  I commented that it almost sounded like a Disney movie...like Snow White or something.  Baylee got a bit surly.  "You ruined Snow White for me years ago, the first time I ever watched it."

"What?"

"Yeah.  I was just a little kid, sitting in the living room, minding my own business, enjoying my movie, when you walked in and said, 'That girl Snow White isn't all there mentally.  That's the only reason why someone would go around talking to animals in a baby voice.'  The movie wasn't the same for me after that!"

"Uhhh....sorry.  I have no memory of doing that."

"Well, you did!"


Oops!  I think she forgives me...maybe.  

More Snow Pics

There were two snow forts.  This one was built by Drew and several other boys.  They ran out of snow in their little area, so they tied that green sled onto the back of that red bike and pedaled up and down the street, collecting more. 

They built it up to a pretty impressive size.

And this one was built by Baylee and Rachel and some other girls.  It was a bit smaller.  lol

(neighborhood kids)

When the time finally came for the snowball war, it lasted about 1.5 minutes before several of the girls went home crying.  #sawthatcoming